Confucius is an expansionist and scientific leader in Civilization 7. He excels at building large cities with a large population, then using that population to support a host of specialists, generating gold, culture, and science per turn. He is very flexible when it comes to the victory conditions as science generation opens up a lot of buildings and paths. You’ll want to focus a lot on expansion of feeder towns to make your capital as large as possible.
This guide covers an overview of Confucius, some early game Antiquity Age strategies, and the best civilizations and mementos.
Confucius Overview
Here’s a breakdown of Confucius’ leader bonuses.
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+25% Growth Rate in Cities. |
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+2 Science from Specialists. |
Bonus Growth Rate
Confucius has cities that grow quickly. That flat bonus growth rate stacks with other bonuses in the game, like the boost from the Hanging Gardens wonder or the Fertility Rites Pantheon. Combine all of these, and you can have a capital that reaches 20 population by turn 100.
Scientific Specialists
Confucius’ enormous cities will make the most out of their specialist slots, with an extra +2 science per specialist. This is on top of the science and culture generation specialists already provide.
The absolute trickiest part of playing Confucius is about balancing specialists with happiness, and having good adjacency planning.
Specialists cost happiness, which could be detrimental in the Antiquity and Exploration Age. As you reach the modern age, you should have enough happiness and policy cards that reduce the impact of specialist happiness, but early on you should only use specialists on your best tiles.
Confucius Strategy In the Antiquity Age
Confucius has quite a unique approach to the Antiquity Age. Let’s take a look.
Early Scouting And Discoveries
Early scouts are unbelievably powerful in Civ 7. We recommend at least two Scouts to start with, though we often triple up for maximum scouting.
This is because we want to grab as many Discoveries as possible, and as you are racing against the AI for these, the more Scouts the better.
You want to prioritize Science and Culture from Discoveries, pushing for your early important technologies like Pottery and Animal Husbandry to boost production in your capital; and your early civics, like Mysticism, to attempt to grab the Fertility Rites Pantheon, which is S-tier for Confucius.
Early Buildings
Confucius gets an excellent growth bonus which makes building the Granary first a much worse choice overall. Instead, focus on production buildings, like the Saw Pit and Brickyard.
Use your first towns to feed your main settlement rather than focus on food in your capital. Produce three settlers immediately after your first two production buildings, i.e the Pit and Brickyard.
Plant those settlers on good tiles with plenty of resources that aren’t too far from your city. Food will be sent back to your capital to help it grow while you focus on production.
Once your towns reach seven population, you can set them to Urban Center Focus to generate Culture and Science on every Quarter. A Quarter is any tile that has two completed districts on it, i.e the Granary and Brickyard.
The Urban Center focus will generate more science per turn than a Library, which means you don’t need to rush Writing – instead, use the production for troops, settlers, and production buildings.
Tech And Civics
We tend to pick up either Pottery or Animal Husbandry first. This depends on what starting tiles you have. Pottery for clay pits and mines, animal husbandry for pastures.
Then you want to grab Masonry, and Masonry II, then Irrigation, then Writing. This will give Confucius a very powerful production start without skimping on science in the long-run. You can easily catch up with your boosted science yields, anyway.
In terms of civics, you almost always want to pick Mysticism first, as this will allow you to get an early Pantheon.
When Should You Place Your First Specialists?
As Confucius, it can be a bit difficult to understand when to place your first specialists.
However, there are some yields that are just too good to pass up on. Let’s take a look at this early game Confucius city.
As you can see, even early on we’ve opened up some great specialist slots. There’s a +6 Science and +2 Culture tile, or a +1.5 Food, 1.5 Gold, +4 Science and +2 Culture tile. These are better than the majority of open rural tiles in the city.
As a rule, you want to get your adjacency set up nicely on your Library tile to maximize your science output.
Science buildings get adjacency from resources. As you can see, the library in this city is receiving adjacency from the Silver and the Horses.
Best Civilizations For Confucius
Confucius has lots of versatility with civilization choice because his bonuses are pretty universal.
Maya
If you just want to go absolutely ballistic with science, then Maya are the civilization for you.
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The Palace gains +0.5 Science for adjacent Vegetated Terrain. |
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+30% Production towards constructing Mundo Perdido. |
The Maya are an excellent civilization for science, though that’s not immediately apparent from their overall bonuses.
They do get a nice (but small) science bonus from vegetated terrain, and the K’uh Nah unique building also provides science, but it’s in the civic tree that this civilization really takes off.
- The Rain Of Chaac provides a +1 Science adjacency on the Altar for any vegetated terrain. This can stack up quickly and applies to all settlements, even your towns.
- Calendar Round is a neat civic. Whenever you complete a Technology, you receive 10% of its cost in Culture. Whenever you complete a Civic, you receive 10% of its cost in Science. With Confucius’ big science boosts, this can get very out of hand – and it applies across all three ages, as it’s a tradition card rather than a policy card.
Khmer
Want to lean completely into Confucius’ growth bonuses? Introducing the Khmer.
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Districts on Rivers do not remove the natural yield of the tile. |
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30% production towards constructing the Angkor Wat. |
The Khmer are all about growth. Their unique building, the Baray, provides a base bonus of +3 food when constructed. However, it also provides an extra +1 food on every floodplain tile in the settlement. With the right starting location, this is a lot of extra food.
However, it’s the Khmer civics that really complement Confucius.
- Amnach – This civic has the Varna tradition, which provides +1 Gold per specialist. This just improves your Confucius specialists even more.
- Chakravarti – This is the best civic in the game for Confucius (probably). It provides +50% growth in the Capital and -5 happiness in every other city. It’s tradition, the Kambu-Mera, which provides +100% Food and Happiness towards maintaining specialists, also makes your specialists much easier to sustain as you progress in the game.
The wording of the Kambu-Mera civic is important. It doesn’t mean that your specialists are free but that you essentially get an extra specialist per specialist for no cost. This is just to make sure there’s no way to imbalance the game by just having completely free specialists across the board.
Best Confucius Mementos
Confucius has lots of great Mementos, both on his own unlock tree and from other leaders.
- At level 2, Confucius unlocks the Brush & Scroll. This is an extremely powerful Memento that increases the growth rate in cities by 5% for every specialist in the city. It maxes out at 25%. While this isn’t the best Memento for Confucius during the Antiquity Age (you just don’t get that many specialists), it’s incredibly powerful during the latter stages of the game.
- Likewise, Confucius’ level 5 Memento, the Altar Set, provides a sizable bonus to specialists: +1 Culture and Gold for each specialist.
- Lastly, Confucius’ final Memento upgrade at level 9, is The Analects. This provides a further +1 Science per specialist.
In general, though, you want to adjust your Mementos as you play. We enjoy the Imago Mundi and Marco Polo scouting Mementos in the Antiquity, as you can quickly scan the map and gain gold as you do so. In Exploration, we may switch to Confucius’ more specialist-specific Mementos.
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